Fragmentation is a pervasive problem for enterprises seeking to take advantage of data generated by various applications to drive business decision-making. For almost as long as the IT industry has existed enterprises have struggled to combine and integrate information from multiple data siloes created by a variety of applications and business units. Creating a “single version of the truth” that represents customers, products, suppliers or employees requires not just the ability to integrate and manage data from multiple business entities, regions, departments and applications, but also agreement on the definitions of those terms and the related data. The expectations for agentic AI have further emphasized this ongoing challenge, highlighting the importance of providers focused on data unification and management, such as Reltio.
Reltio was founded in 2011 by chief executive Manish Sood, who was previously involved in the development of master data management platforms at Siperian and Informatica. Reltio’s product was designed to address some of the limitations of more traditional approaches to MDM by embracing a cloud-based architecture that would be adaptive to evolving business needs and data sources. The provider now has over 400 employees and customers across 140 countries that generated more than $150 million in annual recurring revenue for the company’s most recent fiscal year. Backed by investors including NewView Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Crosslink Capital, 406 Ventures and Brighton Park Capital, Reltio has raised a total of $237 million in funding, most recently adding $120 million in 2021, which valued the company at approximately $1.7 billion. Reltio’s capabilities are delivered via the Reltio Data Cloud platform, which provides the data unification and management foundations for its Reltio Customer 360, Reltio Multidomain MDM and Reltio Entity Resolution products. Reltio was rated as a Provider of Merit in the 2024 ISG Buyers Guides for Data Intelligence, Master Data Management, Data Quality and Data Integration.
The ongoing challenge posed by data silos has been highlighted by enterprise attempts to combine data from multiple applications to fuel AI applications.
Reltio Data Cloud is designed to provide enterprises with an adaptive approach to data management that reflects the requirements of digital business. Reltio Data Cloud provides the foundational capabilities for enterprises to unify and enrich data from multiple operational applications and data platforms to establish trusted, high-quality data sets that drive operational decision-making as well as analytic and AI applications.
The capabilities are made available to users via three dedicated products: Reltio Multidomain Master Data Management, which aids the unification, standardization and enrichment of foundational reference data; Reltio Customer 360, which enables a single view of customer data; and Reltio Entity Resolution, which utilizes large language models to identify and match records related to individual entities from within one or more datasets. Reltio also offers velocity packs with predefined data models and data integration configurations as part of its strategy to accelerate return on investment in key verticals. Targets include life sciences, financial services, insurance and healthcare, along with horizontal requirements for business-to-business and business-to-consumer use cases and supplier and product data requirements.
AI is a core component of Reltio Data Cloud. In addition to the LLM-based entity resolution models, the provider’s Reltio Intelligent Assistant—introduced in early 2024—provides a conversational interface that enables users to search profiles, create data visualizations and query Reltio’s documentation, amongst other things. Reltio also recently announced the general availability of the Reltio AgentFlow MCP Server, which utilizes the Model Context Protocol standard to enable agentic AI applications to interoperate with Reltio Data Cloud capabilities. I assert that through 2027, almost all data-related software providers will adopt Model Context Protocol to provide interoperability between agentic applications and trusted enterprise data and business workflows.
Another recent announcement from Reltio was the introduction of the Reltio Lightspeed Data Delivery Network, designed to support real-time applications and personalized customer experiences by enabling access to data in under 50 milliseconds, regardless of where it resides globally.
I previously noted that data governance and AI are symbiotic. AI automates and accelerates previously manual processes for data classification, data quality checking and data lineage. Data governance products, in coordination with AI platforms, can improve trust in data for AI projects. Reltio is well-placed to take advantage of this trend with its platform addressing master data management, data quality, data integration and aspects of data governance. The latter is arguably a potential area for expansion, although the company has, to date, chosen to focus on partnerships with data catalog providers, including Alation, Collibra, Databricks and Microsoft. I recommend that enterprises assessing data management and unification requirements for operational and AI use cases include Reltio in the evaluations.
Regards,
Matt Aslett